Prof Bashar Nuseibeh

SEIF 2011 Prize for "Software Engineering for Usable Mobile Privacy Management"

In the last decade, the role of software engineering has changed rapidly and radically. Globalisation and mobility of people and services, pervasive computing, and ubiquitous connectivity through the Internet have disrupted traditional software engineering boundaries and practices. People and services are no longer bound by physical locations. Computational devices are no longer bound to the devices that host them. Communication, in its broadest sense, is no longer bounded in time or place. The Software Engineering & Design (SEAD) group at the Open University (OU) is leading software engineering research in this new reality that requires a paradigm shift in the way software is developed and used. This platform grant will grow and sustain strategic, multi-disciplinary, crosscutting research activities that underpin the advances in software engineering required to build the pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems that will be tightly woven into the fabric of a complex and changing socio-technical world. In addition to sustaining and growing the SEAD group at the OU and supporting its continued collaboration with the Social Psychology research group at the University of Exeter, the SAUSE platform will also enable the group to have lasting impact across several application domains such as healthcare, aviation, policing, and sustainability. The grant will allow the team to enhance the existing partner networks in these areas and to develop impact pathways for their research, going beyond the scope and lifetime of individual research projects.

REASON will develop a comprehensive toolbox of general principles, mathematically based notations and models, reasoning methods, and systematic approaches enabling autonomous systems to operate with unprecedented levels of resilience. Analogous to the adaptive toolbox widely hypothesised to underpin human decision-making under uncertainty,17 our REASONing toolbox will allow autonomous systems to decide and perform resilience-enhancing actions safely, securely and observant of relevant social, legal, ethical, empathy and cultural rules and norms. Using the REASONinig toolbox, autonomous systems will proactively quantify and reduce uncertainty, predict and preempt disruptions, seek assistance from and co-operate with humans and peer autonomous systems, and provide assurances to instil stakeholder trust. The REASON vision will be delivered by a team of Computer Scientists ( CS ), Engineers ( Eng ), sychologists ( Psy ), Philosophers ( Phil ), Lawyers ( Law ), and Mathematicians (Math) with an extensive track record of leading large research programmes and of delivering research in all areas of the project.

The Citizen Forensics project reframes key challenges that underlie modern policing in a socio-technical world; a world instrumented with mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies, in which many citizens and communities live, work and play, but which must also manage threats to their wellbeing and their rights. The project aims to support a new engagement between authorities (such as the police) and communities of citizens in order to better investigate (and in the long term reduce) potential or actual threats to citizen security, safety, and privacy. This includes both empowering the police by opening up new ways of citizens providing data in ways that protect privacy and anonymity, and empowering citizens by using these new technologies to also hold the police to account. We will be harnessing many of the so-called Internet of Things, Smart City and Smart Home technologies to encourage and allow citizens to help the police collect and analyse disparate data to improve public safety at both local and ultimately national levels. This multidisciplinary investigation draws upon expertise in computing, policing, psychology and organisational theory. For more information, see https://www.citizenforensics.org/

Developing software is no longer the domain of the select few with deep technical skills, training and knowledge. Mobile and web app development and easy to program hardware devices, such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, have resulted in a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds developing software. Such software can be, and is, used by a potentially global user base. But what are the security implications of such software development by ‘the masses’. Are we moving toward a ‘wild west’ in which a diversity of skills and motives in those developing software will affect its security? This diversity of developers is here to stay and is at the heart of a range of innovations in the digital economy. However, little is currently understood about the security behaviours and decision-making processes of the masses – Johnny – engaging in software development. Without such foundational understanding, we cannot hope to leverage a hitherto untapped resource, Johnny, in developing resilient software that is used by millions around the world. From this foundation, we can consider the implications of their assumptions and design choices and provide new tools and techniques to support them. Such foundational research and advances are the focus of this proposal.

The aim of this project will be to build a dynamic and resilient socio-technical system that sustains care for people with chronic illnesses in old age. Its principle novelty will be the integration of human and technical resources into a single system that will have resilient care at its heart. Resilience will mean both social resilience and technical resilience. To deliver social resilience we will explore how technology can help to harness existing social support as well as building wider social capital around older people. To deliver technical resilience we will design systems that integrate existing technological capacity in novel configurations as well as integrating new sensing / Internet of Things capability. However, the key innovation will be that the integrated socio-technical system will allow for the interchange between human assets and technological assets in the delivery of a resilient care architecture for older people. The system will not seek to replace human resource with a technology derived alternative, but to harness the capacities of all elements of the system in a way that serves the needs of the older person. Sometimes the system will respond to need through mobilising human resources, at other times the same need could be met through technological capability. In that sense, the system will have the needs of the older person at its core.

This EngageKTN project is investigating forensic-readiness requirements of unmanned aerial systems, to help identify causes of safety and security related air traffic incidents. Unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) are increasingly creating challenges for managing the safety of aircraft that share the airspace with them. The collection and use of forensic data associated with drones and surrounding physical contexts is key to effective incident investigations. The research is focusing on the architecture and concept of operations for European unmanned traffic management, and the ability to preserve such vital information as evidence for forensic investigations. The team of the project include Dr. Yijun Yu (PI), Mr. Danny Barthaud (Research Software Engineer), and Prof. Bashar Nuseibeh, Prof. Blaine Price, Prof. Andrea Zisman, Prof. Arosha Bandara at The Open University, and Dr. Anthony P. Rushton, Dr. David L. Bush, and Dr. George S. Koudis at NATS. The project URL is at https://droneidentity.eu.

Software engineers increasingly treat software systems development as an evolutionary process, in which the software is continuously modified throughout its lifetime in response to changes in customer requirements and needs. Modifications are usually carried out by halting system execution, updating source code or structure, and then re-executing the software. However, a new paradigm of engineering adaptive software is emerging. In this paradigm, models are created during systems development, but these then continue to evolve at both production time and at execution time (becoming so-called "runtime models"). Runtime models differ from the models that are developed during software production, in that they need to accommodate events that occur while the system is running and interacting with its operating environment, potentially changing the decision-making behaviour of the systems that they underpin.

Salary enhancment to retain staff at UK insitutions.